It is easy to criticise ideas unconstructively. And circuses can only do so much.
As an anecdotal example, I live in the midwest and have a couple of friends who have bottom-of-the-barrel jobs, making maybe $10/hr (which is what you get at McD's around here). That's enough that with careful management of their funds they were able to buy a very small house, eat modestly, drive a car, and cover the expenses for their child (we don't have smog laws here, so you can get a serviceable car for < $1k). They're not particularly motivated people, and haven't put any effort into getting better jobs, but they're also OK with living in the bad part of town in a postage stamp house. Nonetheless, their standard of living is dramatically higher than that of the vast majority of the rest of the world, and even though they're by far on the bottom end of the income scale, they're doing just fine.
We have fairly permissive zoning laws and building codes here, and people pop up houses like it's going out of style, so housing is very cheap compared to other parts of the country (the downside being that we have huge neighborhoods of small, cheaply built houses). Even though I don't particularly enjoy the look of these neighborhoods, they do serve a purpose, and I'm glad that we let people build them because they enable people like my friends to live on a very tight budget (and quite honestly, what somebody wants to build on their private property isn't anybody else's business, unless it's dangerous to people outside of the property in some way). True story: I needed a hay barn and I needed it to be extremely cheap, so I bought the ass-end of a cube van and plopped it on the back of my property. No flak from the township :). The chassis of the cube van is now living a happy life as a septic pumping truck.
Your view of the world and how it should be is incredibly depressing and defeatist to me.
And the fact that you think my friends are living 'just above the breadline' is somewhat interesting to me; I would disagree. The own, not rent, a home. They have and cashflow a child (a very expensive thing these days, and considering the cost to society and the planet, it should be a privilege). Not only do they have food, but they never want for it (granted, they can't spend $15 on fast food for the family whenever they don't feel like cooking). They have a car. If that's 'on or slightly above the breadline', then we might not even be using a common vocabulary.